Pioneer from Georgia

Gerald Wilfring Gore is a prolific arranger of music who for years made a modest living turning out choral adaptations of such varied works as Home on the Range, Pestalozza's Ciribiribin, William Byrd's Ave Verum Corpus. Last week, in Manhattan's Caspary Auditorium, a crowd of musical professionals gathered to honor Arranger Gore on his 75th birthday. But the man who rose to take a shy bow at concert's end was known to the audience not as Gerald Gore but as Composer Wallingford Riegger.

Although the compositions of Wally Riegger are widely and justly admired, particularly by fellow composers, the man who created them has always had to make a living doing something else. Gerald Gore is only one of nine pseudonyms under which Riegger has written about 400 arrangements at $40 apiece. Most of them, he testifies, "were claptrap; they were well done, but none of them caused any thrills." Nevertheless, they "turned an honest penny" for Gore-Riegger; along with teaching, they enabled him to devote the rest of his time to the compositions that, far from claptrap, are among the most distinguished of his generation.

Twitters from a Satellite. The bulk of Composer Riegger's work is atonal--in fact, he was an atonalist back in the days before the tone row had replaced the velvet neckcloth as a musical status symbol. But in contrast to the cool, desiccated manner of European twelve-tone composers of the Schoenberg-Webern school, Riegger turned out propulsive, ruggedly rhythmic compositions full of jangling dissonances and roughhewn contrasts. The effect was sometimes as startling as an impressionist-styled canvas executed with a house painter's brush.

Last week's concert displayed the early Riegger in Blue Voyage (1926), a shimmering, almost Debussyan mood piece; the later Riegger in Variations for Violins and Violas (1957), a series of brief, busy, crotchetily rhythmic episodes that exploded in the ear as strangely as a satellite's call; and finally the less flamboyant, middle-ground Riegger in the serene, elegant textures of Canon on a Ground Bass by Henry Purcell (1951). Not included was the work for which Riegger is perhaps best known--his Third Symphony (1947), which won the New York Music Critics' Circle Award in the season of its premiere. In that fine work Riegger is at his abrasive best, putting night-wailing strings against the muscularly marching brasses in an effect that is taut, menacing and powerfully moving.

Boos from the Balcony. If the public has been slow catching up to Riegger, Riegger was even slower catching up to himself. Born in Albany, Ga., the son of a lumbermill owner, he started studying the cello so that he could join the rest of the musically gifted Rieggers in family musicales. He emerged from the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School of Music) in the school's first graduating class in 1907. After three years of additional study in Germany, Riegger decided the cello was not his instrument after all, dabbled in conducting instead. In those days he was a violent antimodernist who vigorously booed such works as Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy, considered radical at the time. When he was 35, Riegger finally turned to composing, soon "abandoned tonality" in order to "break through the inhibitions of my early surroundings," heard his first atonal work, Study in Sonority, roundly hissed when Leopold Stokowski conducted its premiere in Philadelphia in 1929.

Since then, while other men's atonal compositions became more fashionable than his, Wally Riegger has gone his solitary way, "putting off composing as much as I can," but nevertheless building up an impressive body of work. Along the way, he happily notes, he was finally able to dispense with Gerald Wilfring Gore.

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